But on Saturday morning he came to turn us loose. By this time we seemed blood brothers to the others in the cage ... negro ... mulatto ... white ... criminal and vicious ... weak, and victims of circumstance ... everything sloughed away. Genuine tears stood in our eyes as with strong hand-grips we wished the poor lads good luck!
We stumbled down the jail stairway up which, three months before, we had been conducted to our long incarceration in the cage. The light of free day stormed in on our prison-inured eyes in a blinding deluge of white and gold ... we stepped out into what seemed not an ordinary world, but a madness and tumult of birds, a delirious green of trees too beautiful for any place outside the garden of Paradise.
"Come on," said Bud, "let's go on down the main street and thank Womber for not pressing the case—"
"To hell with Womber!"
"Well, then, I'm going to thank him."
"I'm grateful enough.... I might write him a letter thanking him ... but I'm not anxious to linger in this neighbourhood."
So Bud and I parted company, shaking hands good-bye; he headed west ... to China and the East, finally, he said ... I never knew his real name ... neither of us gave his right name to the town's officials....
As I sought the railroad tracks again, the good air and my unwonted freedom made me stagger, so that several negroes laughed at me heartily, thinking I was drunk.
I sat down on a railroad tie and tenderly and solicitously took a brown package out of my inside pocket—the brown paper on which I had inscribed with enthusiasm the curious songs of jail, cocaine, criminal, and prostitute life I had heard during my three months' sojourn behind bars.